Smit Patelhttp://smitpatel.com
Musings on business and personal growth.Sat, 29 Jul 2017 21:32:01 +0000en-UShourly1https://wordpress.org/?v=4.9.49 Lessons That Helped Me Succeed in Business Developmenthttp://smitpatel.com/business-development-lessons/
http://smitpatel.com/business-development-lessons/#respondSat, 29 Jul 2017 21:28:08 +0000http://smitpatel.com/?p=4041) Embrace uncertainty I’ve always considered my impatience a strength because it’s forced me to learn things quickly but it’s not a great trait for BD. You need to be professionally persistent. Calling or emailing someone everyday makes you look desperate and guarantees a way to be moved to the spam folder. 2) Love the [...]

I’ve always considered my impatience a strength because it’s forced me to learn things quickly but it’s not a great trait for BD. You need to be professionally persistent. Calling or emailing someone everyday makes you look desperate and guarantees a way to be moved to the spam folder.

2) Love the grind

The thought of figuring out the stakeholders at the target account and how we can get their attention gets me fired up. If you treat this like a day job, you’ll be mediocre or fail miserably.

3) Know your workflow

Productivity is key to working smart. Since I’m a morning person, I realized that I get more done in the first half of the day so I started my days earlier. I use Salesforce tasks to remind me the people I need to reach out to on that particular day.

4) Find out what works, do more of it

Once you stumble upon a certain messaging or call routine that works, keep repeating it. Don’t try to fix what’s working. Copy 99% and improve on the 1%.

5) Create your own hypothesis and keep testing

If you expect to get results doing what everyone else is doing, you’re not going to be exceed your goals. After testing various methods of outreach, I quickly realized that emailing would be the best way to secure meetings with stakeholders instead of using cold calling.

5) Go high or go home

If you provide a B2B product or service, you need to try going directly to the C/VP/Director level folks or else you’ll waste countless hours with someone who doesn’t have the power to make or influence decisions.

6) Sell business outcomes, not features

Businesses are not looking to buy your shiny features or functionalities. You need to show how you can help them improve their team, job or the bottomline.

7) Be human

Treat people the way you expect to be treated. No one wants to read an email or a phone call that sounds like a robot.

8) Find a work/life balance

Life’s not a race, it’s a marathon. If you don’t shut off for a certain hours in the day, you’ll burn yourself out and eventually result in poor performance at work.

9) You don’t get what you don’t ask for

Whether it’s a meeting with a stakeholder or asking for a next step, you need to be constantly testing your limits. If you never ask, the answer is always no.

]]>http://smitpatel.com/business-development-lessons/feed/0SDR’s, Here’s The #1 Thing You Need to Remember While Prospectinghttp://smitpatel.com/sdrs-heres-the-1-thing-you-need-to-remember-while-prospecting/
http://smitpatel.com/sdrs-heres-the-1-thing-you-need-to-remember-while-prospecting/#respondTue, 01 Nov 2016 23:53:37 +0000http://smitpatel.com/?p=400Prospectors make things happen. This quote by Aaron Ross speaks volumes: If you’re in a prospecting role, your success and salary both depend on getting your foot in the door. This puts us in a tough spot because you start seeing people as numbers that you need to dial or an email that your need [...]

If you’re in a prospecting role, your success and salary both depend on getting your foot in the door. This puts us in a tough spot because you start seeing people as numbers that you need to dial or an email that your need to send so you can get through your list.

When I first started in business development, I used to get emotional when I’d see prospects open my emails but not reply or when they said yes to a meeting but asked to reschedule which never happened after. It took me a couple months and then I finally realized:

“You’re the least of the prospect’s priorities.”

They have several day to day problems that they’re trying to tackle. Even family or career related priorities can get jumbled into their mind. This means that your job as a prospector isn’t to sell them. Your job is to inform them about your product or service that could take one problem off their plate. This mindset changes everything because every email that you send or every phone call that you make will be positioned from a perspective to help make their life better.

This also means that you can’t expect them to reply to shitty outreach which is focused on your product features and how much money your company has raised. Talk about them, not you.

When they don’t reply to your emails or calls, your followup should be designed to keep your product or service top of their mind. Lot of times they’ve seen your messages but they might’ve forgot to reply to it.

It’s never personal, you’re doing your job and they’re doing theirs. Tailor your outreach on making their job easy or making them look good, it’ll do wonders.

]]>http://smitpatel.com/sdrs-heres-the-1-thing-you-need-to-remember-while-prospecting/feed/0Follow-Uphttp://smitpatel.com/follow-up/
http://smitpatel.com/follow-up/#respondWed, 23 Mar 2016 23:34:26 +0000http://smitpatel.com/?p=393There’s plenty written about “showing up” and increasing your luck surface area. It’s a great first step to getting what you want because if you don’t put in the effort, you can’t expect to get anything in return. That said, people miss out on the next important step – “following-up.” Let say that you sent [...]

]]>There’s plenty written about “showing up” and increasing your luck surface area. It’s a great first step to getting what you want because if you don’t put in the effort, you can’t expect to get anything in return.

That said, people miss out on the next important step – “following-up.”

Let say that you sent an email to someone for a job and they didn’t reply so you assumed that they hired someone else. Think about the million other possibilities that could’ve happened. What if they were on vacation? What if they saw your email, but they were planning to reply to you later and forgot? What if they deleted the email by accident? The list goes on.

Following-up is key to staying “top of mind” of the person you’re trying to reach.

Let’s say you asked someone for advice and it helped you get what you wanted. Most people drop the ball here (myself included in the past). They don’t update the person on their success. Not only are you ruining your reputation, you’re also ruining a chance to create more opportunities for yourself.

It doesn’t take too much effort to follow-up, but it certainly increases your chances of success.

Remember you’re usually not the most important priority in everyone’s life, you just need to give them a slight nudge to be one :)

]]>http://smitpatel.com/follow-up/feed/0The Thing About Advice…http://smitpatel.com/advice/
http://smitpatel.com/advice/#respondSun, 10 Jan 2016 20:55:39 +0000http://smitpatel.com/?p=387The first piece of advice that I can recall getting is “Advice is like a**holes, everyone has one and they all stink.” At the time, it felt a bit funny to me but it all makes sense now based on life experiences so far. As humans, we always know what we want to do but [...]

]]>The first piece of advice that I can recall getting is “Advice is like a**holes, everyone has one and they all stink.”

At the time, it felt a bit funny to me but it all makes sense now based on life experiences so far.

As humans, we always know what we want to do but we go to friends, mentors and family to get “advice.” We just want to hear from their mouths that we are doing is right.

When someone gives you advice that is similar to what you really want to do, you think it’s good advice.

There’s no such thing as “good advice.” The people who are really helpful are the ones that ask you the right questions to help you think through a decision. They are the ones who are not telling you what to do, they lead you to what you should be doing based on your situation.

There’s an influx of “inspirational” quotes on our facebook, twitter, Instagram accounts. The ones that we end up liking are the ones that fit with our mindset. We basically want someone to tell us that we are right. What we don’t realize is there is probably a quote for each situation.

If you want to go for something, you will like a quote that tells you to keep trying. If you don’t want to do something, you will like a quote that tells you to move on because there are better things waiting for you.

When you get advice from a person, listen to those that say “in my experience, this is what worked.” This way you know that something worked for them but doesn’t necessarily mean that it will work for you. Most of the times, though, people will tell you “do x” because it worked for them without realizing that everyone has a different story to write.

Personally, I’ve decided to make decisions on two things: happiness and regret. If it makes me happy, I will do it. I would rather do what my gut tells me than regret later. It’s that simple.

Everyone is different so you can never follow the textbook advice that some Instagram account is telling you or what some friend is telling you.

]]>http://smitpatel.com/advice/feed/0How To Create Your Analytics Tracking Strategyhttp://smitpatel.com/analytics-tracking-strategy/
http://smitpatel.com/analytics-tracking-strategy/#respondTue, 04 Aug 2015 15:04:13 +0000http://smitpatel.com/?p=384“I have analytics(Mixpanel/KISSmetrics) up and running but I’m not sure if I’ve set it up correctly or if it’s actually helping us.” That’s ok. Handling growth at a SaaS company can be daunting since the discipline is brand new and evolving rapidly. One of the major steps to understand how your app is growing or [...]

]]>http://smitpatel.com/analytics-tracking-strategy/feed/0You Should Be Concerned About Marketing Toolshttp://smitpatel.com/marketing-tools/
http://smitpatel.com/marketing-tools/#respondWed, 22 Jul 2015 20:40:33 +0000http://smitpatel.com/?p=381Take a deep breath and look at the chart below from ChiefMarTech. This is not a joke. Marketing is getting more tech savvy than ever and more messier than ever. A modern marketer probably has at least 5-10 tools in their “Marketing Stack” and that’s just the beginning. The overflow of data from each application [...]

]]>http://smitpatel.com/marketing-tools/feed/0Ego: Real Ballers Don’t Have Onehttp://smitpatel.com/ego/
http://smitpatel.com/ego/#respondTue, 19 May 2015 20:59:53 +0000http://smitpatel.com/?p=378Always trying to be right. Needing to be the center of attraction. Namedropping. Self-consciousness. Speaking over people. Raising your voice. The list goes on and on. I possessed these in some shape or another but in the past few months it hit me that all these lead to one thing: Ego. In other words, the [...]

]]>http://smitpatel.com/ego/feed/0Learn How To Be A Good Manager From The Best I Hadhttp://smitpatel.com/how-to-be-a-good-manager/
http://smitpatel.com/how-to-be-a-good-manager/#commentsFri, 13 Mar 2015 15:04:47 +0000http://smitpatel.com/?p=334I was this 19 year old kid at HubSpot trying to learn. Based on my interview I didn’t even think I would get the internship but I did. Rebecca Corliss introduced me to the best manager I ever had: Meghan Anderson. As my career grows I keep referring back to her as a benchmark on [...]

As my career grows I keep referring back to her as a benchmark on how to be a good manager.

What made her so good? Well a whole lot of reasons.

Listening skills

Being an introvert made her a great listener and observer.

She said her in post: “If you’re not the center of attention in a social situation, you have the freedom to observe people more closely. You can better assess a room, understand what motivates each person within it and what holds them back.”

Most managers want you to tell what they want to hear but Meghan heard what you wanted her to hear and also assessed hidden issues without anything being said.

Empathy

I was working hard sometimes even on Friday evenings. She would look at me and say “Smit you are in college and it’s Friday. Get the hell out of here.”

]]>http://smitpatel.com/how-to-be-a-good-manager/feed/2My Personal Manifestohttp://smitpatel.com/personal-manifesto/
http://smitpatel.com/personal-manifesto/#respondTue, 10 Feb 2015 14:22:07 +0000http://smitpatel.com/?p=332Every good leader, artist or philosopher has a personal manifesto, a list of principles they live by. These are mine. Be loyal. Do what it takes for friends and family. Never forget those who supported you even in the smallest way. Take a stand. Openly admit when you’re wrong. You don’t always have to be [...]

]]>http://smitpatel.com/personal-manifesto/feed/0I Dropped Out Of School, Got A High Paying Job In Silicon Valley….And Then I Quit.http://smitpatel.com/dropped-school-got-high-paying-job-silicon-valley-quit/
http://smitpatel.com/dropped-school-got-high-paying-job-silicon-valley-quit/#respondFri, 30 Jan 2015 16:13:26 +0000http://smitpatel.com/?p=326In the fall of 2014, I would’ve been going back to college as a senior, enjoying the last year and taking cool pics with my friends at graduation in the spring. Instead, I decided to take the year off to work at an awesome company in SF. But every morning I asked myself “Is this [...]